The Science and Stories of Endurance with Alex Hutchinson

Welcome to another episode of The Business of Endurance, where we explore the edges of human potential through the lens of science and personal experience. Today, we're honoured to host Alex Hutchinson, the author of "Endure," a book I rate as one of the best I've ever read. "Endure" isn't just a book; it's a journey into the heart of human capacity. Alex delves deep into the mental aspects of endurance sport, sparking more thought on this topic than any other work in the field. His insights are a beacon for athletes, coaches, and anyone fascinated by the limits of human performance. Today's conversation spans from the incredible feats of athletes like Eliud Kipchoge, whose sub-2-hour marathon stands as a testament to breaking mental and physical barriers, to the everyday applications of endurance science in business and personal health. We'll discuss how mental conditioning shapes top-tier athletes, how AI will impact the world of business and sport and dive into how the perception of effort can redefine what we believe is possible. His profound knowledge helps us understand the intricacies of endurance, not just in sport, but in every challenging aspect of our lives, so I know you are going to love this episode with the incredible Alex Hutchinson.


Highlights:

• The Sub 2 Marathon Project
• Breaking Mental and Physical Limits
• The Role of Technology in Endurance Sports
• Balancing Technology in Endurance Sports
• The Impact of AI on Endurance Sports
• AI's Influence on Journalism
• Exciting Developments in Sports Nutrition
• Recommended Reads and Influential Books
• Creative Process and Overcoming Blocks

Links:

The AI Advance with Charles Reading
The Data Decoder by Claire Fudge

Connect with Alex Hutchinson on his LinkedIn & Website

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

I'm Charlie Redding and I'm Claire Fudge. Welcome to the Business of Endurance.

Speaker 3: 0:16

What drives us to seek out the unknown? What do we get out of it? When do we decide to keep exploring? When do we decide to stop and enjoy what we've got? What do we do right? What do we do wrong? What can we do better? How many carbohydrates can we really take? Can we find ways of getting them in that are less uncomfortable? Is it necessary? Are there alternatives that are better?

Speaker 1: 0:40

Welcome to another episode of the Business of Endurance, where we explore the edges of human potential through the Business of Endurance, where we explore the edges of human potential through the lens of science and personal experience. Today, we're honoured to host Alex Hutchinson, the author of Endure, a book I rate as one of the best I've ever read. Endure isn't just a book. It's a journey into the heart of human capacity.

Speaker 1: 1:01

Alex delves deep into the mental aspects of endurance sport, sparking more thought on this topic than any other work in this field that I'm aware of. His insights are a beacon for athletes, coaches and anyone fascinated by the limits of human performance. Today's conversation spans from the incredible feats of athletes like Elliot Kitchogi, whose sub-two marathon stands as a testament to breaking mental and physical barriers, to the everyday applications of endurance science in business and personal health. We'll discuss how mental conditioning shapes top-tier athletes, how AI can impact the world of business and sport, and we'll dive into how perception of effort can redefine what we believe is possible. His profound knowledge helps us understand the intricacies of endurance, not just in sport, but in every challenging aspect of our lives. So I know you are going to absolutely love this episode with the incredible Alex Hutchinson.

Speaker 2: 1:58

Alex dives deep into what he thinks about collecting data, so you'll hear a little bit more about that, and if you'd like to know how to collect your data around your sleep and nutrition, then stick around, because you will hear a little bit more about it later on.

Speaker 1: 2:18

Alex, welcome to the Business of Endurance podcast. I am really excited to chat to you today. I absolutely love, enjoy your Book. I read a lot of books, and we'll talk about books later on, but your book just stood out as just this. So much brilliant wisdom in it, and I've kept coming back to it multiple times, but not only that. I found myself giving it out to people, clients, friends. I always keep several copies, so I genuinely really happy to have you on the podcast and really looking forward to this conversation. So let's kick things off, though, and let's. I always like to start with the story, and for you, that story for me, is the the most empowering story is that story around Elliot Kipchoge. So, with with the Olympics in mind and the fact that he's going to be trying to win a gold medal, tell us about your experience and what you learned from that whole sub two project sure, first of all, let me start by saying thanks for having me and thanks for giving out copies of my books to other people.

Speaker 3: 3:16

That's like the greatest thing an author can hear. So, yeah, I super appreciate that. So yeah, ellie Kipchoge in the sub two, that's the kind of story that was the backbone of my book. In 2014,. Runner's World commissioned me to do a big, huge analysis of this idea of could anyone run a Sub2 hour marathon, because there was starting to be some talk that we were getting close. I spent months on this project, talked to a lot of experts, crunched a lot of data and wrote a big 10-page piece which concluded with my prediction. That big 10 page piece, which concluded with my prediction that, yes, we would see a sub two hour marathon sometime around 2075 was my guess. So that was 2014.

Speaker 3: 3:50

Two years later, I got a call from my editor at runners world saying Nike has a big project. They want to break two hours for the marathon sometime in the next few months and they've offered us a chance to go behind the scenes, follow their progress and and write about it. Would you like to be the reporter? Would you like to fly out to Nike headquarters, meet the runners, and I just thought what is going on? This is ludicrous. I've spent a lot of time establishing that Sub2, for now at least, well beyond human capabilities. The world record was just under 203 at the time, and three minutes is a long way for an elite marathoner. And so that was my introduction into what became known as the Breaking 2 project, where Nike spent, I would estimate, tens of millions of dollars trying to optimize everything about how fast a human can run a marathon, including selecting three of what they thought were the greatest runners in the world at the time, one of whom turned out to be Elliot Kipchoge. He's won the last two Olympic marathons. He's pretty widely acknowledged as the greatest marathoner who's ever lived, but still Running Sub two was a tall ask, but over the course of about six months, nike sort of doled out the various things they were going to do holding the race at a Formula One track in Italy and optimizing nutrition and pacing, having this rotating cast of an arrowhead formation of pacemakers. Most importantly, introducing a brand new shoe technology with carbon fiber plates in it. That has turned out to be, I think, the big difference maker.

Speaker 3: 5:09

Anyway, we got to the day 2017, may 6th 2017, the anniversary of Roger Bannister's first sub-format mile and Kipchoge didn't do it. But he came unbelievably close. He ran two hours flat in 35 seconds. He was on pace until the sort of closing miles and he didn't do it. But I think he transformed everyone's conception of what a human could do. And it's one thing to sit down at a desk and write down a bunch of calculations to say if you block the wind by this much and the speed is so, and actually that should save us a minute or two and the shoes should save us some time. You do the calculations and say actually we should be able to do it, but to see someone do it was really surprising.

Speaker 3: 5:53

And Kipchoge then went on to break two hours a year and a half later in Vienna at another staged race which isn't world record eligible because he had pacemakers who were not running the whole race or weren't starting at the beginning. But all of this became sort of a metaphor for the idea of limits. We establish what we think is possible and it's very hard to shake that belief that one thing is possible and another thing is not possible and there's a boundary between the two. Breaking two, I think, really reshaped a lot of people's perceptions about what was possible, and so I think when we saw that subsequent to these staged exhibition attempts is that people became much more aggressive in marathons and the world record is now about 30 seconds away from the two hour barrier under record conditions. And, yeah, it's about the interplay between mental and physical limits and that was a really fun process to watch.

Speaker 1: 6:39

I think it's just a fascinating subject and actually I had heard the Roger bannister story that you the myth story, but on a at a motivational event years ago, and I was like, oh, that's incredible, 400 people did it within 12 months of him doing the four minute mile. And then I listened to your book. I was like that was rubbish. It took I think it took 20 years to get to the 300, didn't it? I think that's something like that. But equally, we did see that happen very soon after Roger Bannister did the four-minute mile and we saw it again and again. How soon do you think it will be until we actually see a qualifying sub-two marathon time?

Speaker 3: 7:15

That's a sad question because Kelvin Kipton is the current world record holder and in Chicago last year where he set the world record, he looked like he had more in the tank. Watching the Chicago marathon last year was the first time I have sat there and thought I think we're ready. I think there's going to be a sub two hour marathon, if not from Kelvin Kipton, then from someone else, because clearly the question after breaking two, the question was is Elliot Kipchoge sort of generational talent, a sort of Bob Beeman of the marathon, and it's going to take 40 years before anyone matches his times? Or is, you know, the product of the current generation of training, knowledge, shoe technology, other forms of race optimization? And so other runners are going to come along and keep upping the ante and Kelvin Kipton showed pretty quickly. It's like actually it wasn't just Kipchoge, the marathoners are getting faster.

Speaker 3: 8:03

Kipton was killed in a car accident a few months ago, which is super sad. He was 24 years old, to all appearances, just getting started. So now the question goes back Were Kipchoge and Kipton two unique generational talents who happened to show up around the same time, or is there going to be someone else who takes that mantle? So at this point, after Kipton did it, I would say within five years there's a 50-50 chance. It's still not easy and sometimes human limits progress, records, progress until suddenly they don't. And you look back at all sorts of different events. You track the world record progressions and it's man, it's just record, record, record record. And then all of a sudden there's a 20-year plateau where no one breaks the record. Nobody knows when that's going to happen until it happens. So I'm certainly, I'm keeping my money in my pocket. I'm not going to any betting sites, but yeah, there's no reason in my books why it won't happen in the next decade.

Speaker 1: 8:50

You've highlighted the importance of shoe technology in that process. It only takes one thing like that to make 30 seconds difference is what we're looking for now, so it doesn't take much. I know there's still a chunk of time in a marathon, but it doesn't take much. I know there's still a chunk of time in a marathon, but it doesn't take a very big innovation to change that, does it?

Speaker 3: 9:08

Yeah, and a marathon is such an enormously complex and unpredictable endeavor. So in any situation, even when Elliot Kipchoge is racing, if I'm ever asked to hypothetically bet on a marathon, it's like do you think so-and-so is going to win? My answer is always no. I'll take the field over any individual because the marathon is super unpredictable. That's just another way of saying that there's a ton left to optimize and so nobody finishes a marathon and it's like everything went perfectly for 42.2 kilometers. I nailed all my nutrition.

Speaker 3: 9:35

It never goes perfectly, which means there's always the chance for like okay, we could get the pacing a little better, we could get luckier with the weather, we could get a slight tailwind. For most of the record marathons can't be on a straight one way course, because otherwise you could get a tailwind the whole way. But you could get lucky and get a tailwind for a large part of the race and then it drops when you're heading back into the wind. There's a lot of things where 30 seconds could fall out of the sky or you could work very hard and obtain those 30 seconds.

Speaker 1: 10:01

Yeah, that makes sense One of the things that absolutely fascinates me about endurance sport, and the more I've got into endurance sport, the more I realize the greater the endurance, the more important the brain is over the body's capability, and we talk a lot about the central governor's system and the ability for our brain to find another level. I remember interviewing Charlie Spedding, who I think I'm right in saying is still the last Brit, the last Team GB athlete, to get a marathon Olympic medal, and I said to him you're running up towards the finish, you're trying to get silver, but you know you're in bronze medal position. If a lion ran out behind you, could you go faster? Of course I could have done it. I couldn't have gone faster in those conditions, but you put a lion behind me, I could go faster.

Speaker 1: 10:46

And being an Ironman athlete, I remember seeing the not at the time but afterwards the Julie Moss story. And yet you see, with ultra runners, you hear stories of them getting to mile 50 and they almost can't walk and yet they put in a PB for the last 10K or something ridiculous like that. Talk to me about that. Why did julie moss collapse just before the line? And why do other people put a pb in, and how do we use this to our advantage.

Speaker 3: 11:12

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. So a couple of things. There are a few different things. First, to your first point that the brain becomes a bigger factor as the distance gets longer. I think that's true.

Speaker 3: 11:23

There are various studies that try there's a sort of general desire in endurance science to say how can we predict performance? If I can take an athlete to a lab, what tests should I do that will tell me how he or she will perform in a race? Or if I can take 100 athletes to the lab and do a bunch of tests on them, can I predict what order they're gonna finish in a given race? And so you can measure things like VO2 max and running economy and lactate threshold. Those are the three classic ingredients in an equation for predicting endurance. And what you find is that the shorter the distance, the better those equations do. And a marathon isn't short. But if you're trying to predict marathon performance, those three equations do pretty well. Half marathon they do even better.

Speaker 3: 12:08

You start to go into ultra marathons. The longer the ultra marathon gets, the less any of those variables matter. So if someone's VO2 max and their running economy and their lactate threshold and they're about to enter a hundred mile race through the mountains. It's going to take 80 hours or something. Don't place any bets just because they're VO2 max. It's helpful to have a good VO2 max and a good running economy, but those aren't the performance determining factors. What are the performance determining factors for a hundred miles?

Speaker 3: 12:28

It's very hard to know. There's a lot of different things. It depends on the context. There's just starting to be work on trying to measure things like resilience and persistence and psychological constructs to see how well they product ultra endurance performance. None of these things is good enough on their own right. It's not good enough just to be really tough but super out of shape, but neither is it good enough just to be in really good shape but not be willing to suffer if you're going to do an ultra marathon. So yeah, the mind is a necessary but not sufficient condition for endurance. Now Julie Moss I was not Julie Moss's doctor. I don't know exactly what was going on with her, but it's speaking in general terms. And Julie Moss she ended up crawling to the finish line of the Ironman in the early eighties and just basically dragging herself by her fingernails and then got caught by someone else. She was winning and she just got caught in the final straightaway, I think it was, and so it was this sort of horrific television footage.

Speaker 1: 13:20

And if anyone hasn't seen this footage, you must go and watch it on YouTube, because it is incredible, isn't it?

Speaker 3: 13:26

It's incredible, it's also hard to watch through your fingers, but in general, when people are in situations like that, it's typically heat stroke or some variation on some type of thing like that, where there is a malfunction going on in their brain, in their neurological system, and it's a potentially serious thing. The modern race director's perspective on that is if you see someone staggering and going sideways, you don't cheer them on. You get the medical team on the course. So there's a general thing that I would say, which is that in 99.9% of circumstances, if you're sprinting, pushing through the end of the race and, as you said with Charlie Spedding, if a lion jumps onto the course behind you, could you go faster? The answer is almost always yes, your brain, through whatever mechanism we want to call it, and the central governor is an idea proposed by a scientist named Tim Noakes, which is the idea that your brain is holding you back for your own protection, so that you don't end up like Julie Moss.

Speaker 3: 14:17

There's lots of scientific debate as to how this actually works, but in general, I think it's fair to say that usually, if the lion jumps out of the course, you can run harder, and that the fundamental struggle in endurance is trying to convince yourself that there's a lion behind you. You're trying to access that reserve that your brain is trying to hold back. However, the consequence of that is, if I ask you to step out the door right now and run yourself unconscious, most of us, including me, certainly can't do that. You can't run yourself unconscious. You just get so tired that you stop. You're like, but I'm trying to run, get heat stroke. But once you start getting into those critical overheating situations and your core temperature is soaring, then things start going haywire and you start losing your coordination and you start going sideways and being unable to stand up. And that's not just fatigue, that's actually something more serious going on. You're kind of roasting from the inside.

Speaker 1: 15:15

Obviously, the lion chasing you is an extreme example, but in that situation you would run yourself unconscious to get away from a lion, I suspect, and or your child being kidnapped. You would probably run yourself unconscious for those. So I suppose it's very difficult to do that except in extreme situations, and we are trying to tap into that. Are there any tactics that you use in your running that have allowed you to tap into that? Are there any tactics that you use in your running that have allowed you to tap into that more, or in with other athletes that you've worked with?

Speaker 3: 15:42

Yeah, I mean, that's the million dollar. Question is how do you access that? Just to be clear, this is a great unknown. Nobody knows how much reserve any person has. Judging by whether someone is grimacing at the finish line or whether they have a lot of sweat, that doesn't tell you whether they've dug to their limits. And I finish a race and it's very hard to know. Did I really give everything I could? I just you don't know.

Speaker 3: 16:04

And I talk about this a bunch in the book, but it's like sometimes some unexpected change in circumstance like you miscounted the laps or something like that suddenly changes the context and you discover that you had way more left than you realize and that can be a really powerful or a coach. As you know, ambie Burfoot is a journalistic mentor of mine, a friend of mine who was also the 1968 Boston marathon champion, and he once wrote that the greatest running workout you can do is have your coach tell you to do five by a mile, as hard as you can, with a couple of minutes break between each one. You do that and after the fifth one, you've spent every penny you've got. You're lying on the grass and the coach comes over and says, okay, do one more at the same pace and you say, but I can't, I just I went as hard as I could for those five. And the coach says, try, see what you can do. And you go out and maybe you're a few seconds slow or whatever. Maybe you can't quite do it, but you can do way more than you realized if you trust your coach and you are motivated to try. So that's an indirect way of answering.

Speaker 3: 16:57

So how do you access more of this reserve?

Speaker 3: 17:00

You practice, you try pushing yourself, but knowing and not just knowing, but believing that when you feel tired that doesn't mean you're done, is probably the most fundamental thing you can do.

Speaker 3: 17:10

So having those experiences like the workout where you go one more rep than you thought was possible, Then, when you're in the race and you feel like, oh no, my rival is starting to pull away and I can't keep up, you can remind yourself it's not that I can't keep up, it's that I'm choosing not to because it would be really hard my body is capable of. And so now I have to decide whether I should try, and maybe that trying will lead you to really burn yourself out and you'll end up dropping out of the race or whatever, in long endurance, the right answer isn't always push yourself harder, right? That's the other side of the coin is that you have to be smart too, because, no matter how motivated you are, if you still have 10 miles to go, scraping the bottom of your energy barrel isn't the wisest thing. That's the best advice I have is to really learn and believe that there is more in the tank, and then you can start trying to access it.

Speaker 1: 18:00

And that there is more in the tank and then you can start trying to access it. And you don't want to be like that famous scene from the Brownlee brothers. You don't want to be that person that collapses 10 meters before the finish line because you buried yourself sufficiently well and I know that was heat stroke at the time. But it's a fine margin If you push yourself to the absolute limit of whether you end up like Julie Moss or Johnny Brownlee or you win. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 18:16

It's a very delicate calculation. One of the races that's most memorable for me my last year in university, at the National University Championships. I thought I had an outside chance of winning a race and so I decided I was just absolutely going to do everything within my power to win. And I was winning with probably 60 meters to go, when someone came on my shoulder a rival who was very good, who'd been to the previous Olympics, and I just was like I'm not going to let him pass me. I gave more than I've ever given at any point in my life and just over those final 60 meters, which seemed to take 10 minutes, he gradually inched ahead of me like literally inch by inch, and by about 30 meters to go. I knew I wasn't going to get them, but I'd given everything I had. And over those last 30 meters I lost the ability to run. I was staggering and there was a flash of light as I hit the finish line. Two other runners went by me and it was a photo finish. They awarded me the bronze medal that night, but then the next morning, after review of the photo finish, they called me up and like you need to give your bronze medal back. It turns out, you were fourth, and so I had lost one spot with 40 meters to go, and I lost the other two spots with less than 10 meters to go.

Speaker 3: 19:21

I crossed the finish line after that race and I was dry, heaving for about 45 minutes. I couldn't get up and I didn't sleep a wink that night because I vomited so much I could barely breathe. I had the bile coming up, my throat had just arched my airways and I still had another race the next day and it went terribly. It was a very sad moment. I knew I could medal and I thought I could win, and instead I ended up fourth. But with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight or 25 years of hindsight I look back and I'm super proud of that race because I know that there's one time in my life where I left nothing on the table. It's just that it was a thousand meter race and I ran a really good 990 meters. So annoying.

Speaker 1: 19:59

I 990 meters, so annoying. I actually raced on Sunday at a local triathlon and somebody pipped me to finish, probably certainly in the last 10 meters as well. Now I ended up third, not second, so it didn't rip me apart in probably the same way I did you, but still I can empathize. One of the stories you tell in the book is there was a time where you were running but you were given the wrong data and you ended up performing way better because somebody had told you you were going faster than you really were. In this day and age, we get so much data constantly thrown at us from our watches. I know if Claire was here she'd be saying, oh, that's why you should avoid technology and yeah, I love the technology side of things. What are your thoughts around getting that data from technology to improve or to hamper your training?

Speaker 3: 20:39

Not to dodge the question, but I think it really depends on the context and the individual. So I do think there's a tendency for people to become over-reliant on the data that's being fed to them. Ultimately, in a race, what you need to be able to do is feel what's sustainable, right. You need to be able to feel is this a pace that I can sustain to the finish line? As you and I both experienced, to within 10 meters of the finish line. Your watch, at this point at least in the evolution of technology, your watch doesn't know exactly how you're feeling. It doesn't know how you slept last night. Just based on pace or heart rate or something like that's not going to be super accurate to tell you whether you're racing as hard as you can. So in a race, you need to be able to tune into the feedback from your body of how you're feeling. And if you spend all your training time running and then just looking down at your watch saying, oh, I need to speed up a little bit, oh, I need to slow down a little bit, and never asking yourself how does this feel, I think that's a risk. I don't run with a GPS watch. I get very little feedback, and that's not because I don't like technology or because I don't like data. In fact, it's the opposite. It's that I love data and I love feedback, and I become pathologically obsessed with it if I give myself access to it.

Speaker 3: 21:44

When I was coming up as a runner in the 90s, we didn't have GPS watches. We didn't have much data at all. It was very hard work to collect data and I collected as much data as I could with my Timex, sometimes with a heart rate monitor, but I would keep meticulous records of all my splits in workouts and my mileage and I would plot it in Lotus 1, 2, 3, and produce these graphs showing my four week running average of mileage versus my current high. I love data and I spend a lot of time with it, but there was a limit to how much time I could spend with it because we just didn't have that much data. Now we have a fire hose of data and so, if I wanted to, I could spend all my time parsing the minutiae of what's the standard deviation of my pace, variation relative to the slope of the terrain that I'm running on, or whatever you know like. You can have an infinite amount of data to collect and look at, and so, for me, I'm the type of person who then will go down that rabbit hole and it'll start to affect my training. I'll be like I need to run a little more to get this certain mileage level, or oh no, I want to make sure that I'm averaging faster for this run than I did for this same run a month ago. So I choose not to do that.

Speaker 3: 22:46

There are lots of people very successful and happy runners who use data a lot more. So it's not the data itself that's the problem. It's the way we use it and the way it makes us feel, and also what we do with it. I guess the one other point I'll make is when people talk about the use of data in sports, there's these tiers that go from you use it descriptively, like it just tells you what you did, to it helps you analyze what you did, up to the point where it's actually telling you what to do.

Speaker 3: 23:11

So are you using your watch to tell you how that workout went, or using your watch to tell you how fast to run within the actual workout and to make your decisions for you? It's worth people thinking about. What are you using your data or your technology for, and is that what you think you should be using it for? Sometimes people let the data make decisions for them without really meaning or intending to. If you have no principled reason that you should be running this pace rather than that pace, letting your watch influence what pace you run is a mistake, because you're just getting obsessed with round numbers or beating last week instead of thinking what's the right pace I should run, not just what can I let my watch drive me to do?

Speaker 1: 23:48

It's interesting, isn't it? It's a really difficult balance between finding the advantages that that technology gives you and also not being driven by it. I know that the saying is that if it's not on Strava, it doesn't exist. You can get so caught up with the technology, whether it's the data or the social media side of it. The important bit is the enjoying it and whatever reasons you're doing it for. To loop back to the central governor principle, I just wanted to ask one final question on that.

Speaker 1: 24:13

It's really provided me with a huge amount of thought in terms of endurance sport and how you can use that to try and override your system. Whether it's killing your body, you're getting sugar. Even if it's not going to actually physically help you in the last 20 minutes, mentally it's helping you. We've talked quite a lot on the podcast about AI, so I suppose there's two questions I wanted to ask you around. This One is how do you see AI impacting the world of endurance sport? And then, secondly, as a journalist and an author, there's a huge threat and a huge opportunity from AI. How do you see that impacting your day-to-day work life as well?

Speaker 3: 24:50

Okay, so let's start with the endurance sport, or even sport more broadly, and it relates to what we were just talking about with technology and data. We're in an era where we have the ability to collect huge streams of data in field sports or court sports. You've got GPS data showing the exact movement of every player at every moment and you can calculate and parse. Were they more likely to be moving at this speed following this type of event on this type of day? For runners, you can have comprehensive biomechanical data exactly how someone's stride is changing as they fatigue under different circumstances, on different terrain, and so on. The last decade or so, working as a journalist in this space, I know from the press releases I get there have been like approximately 50 billion startup companies that are offering technology that produces these huge streams of data. And again, as I was saying before, the question you have to ask yourself is what are you doing with the data? What insights is it giving you or how is it changing your decisions? And if not, that's okay, you can have fun with the data, but just recognize that it's what you're doing is playing, not adding value to your training or anything. So AI Until relatively recently I would have said. You know what I think? Running stride is too complicated. I don't think we're going to find out. Humans are too variable to be able to pick out. Oh, you need to make this change to reduce your risk of getting injured, because in people like you, this pattern where your foot does this is associated with injury. Ai changes the game in a way where I no longer have any useful intuition as to what patterns it's possible to pick out of a huge set of data. And if you get enough data and a smart enough AI system, who knows what's possible in terms of you can think of how games change. So basketball has changed dramatically over the last 10, 20 years, where teams take a lot more three-pointers. They realized that there was a sort of arbitrage opportunity, that three-pointers were more valuable. Professional basketball teams are taking those sorts of insights to a far deeper level. Looking at, oh, we can parse the data and see that when we have this combination of players and they get a shot out from this part of the floor, they're scoring 53% of the time, whereas it's just 49% of the time. When they're shooting from this other part of the floor, they're scoring 53% of the time, whereas it's just 49% of the time when they're shooting from this other part of the floor. Therefore, we're now going to start shooting from this other, and that's like stage two. What is stage 10 in terms of what the patterns and the data are going to tell us in terms of how we should move, what strategies we should do?

Speaker 3: 27:12

I'm generally like a tech skeptic. I think that a lot of the technology that teams use or the professional athletes use is not useful or doesn't provide not just recovery technology, but monitoring technology. You want to know whether you're ready to push hard after a hard workout. Can you train hard the next day? Are you ready to go? And there's all sorts of systems that have purported to do this for a long time. You can check your heart rate variability and combine that with data about resting heart rate and combine that with subjective feel. All of those are interesting and there's real physiology behind them, but I'm not convinced that they outperform the sort of old-fashioned approach.

Speaker 3: 27:42

If you wake up in the morning and you say how do I feel? Not so great, okay, I'll go for a jog, a warmup. How do I feel now? Still not so great, okay, I'm going to actually push my workout till tomorrow, like technology, isn't providing a step change over. Just like Dexil, in a sense. Again, ai changes the equation because the ability to find patterns in hugely complex data and potentially to be able to individualize, then the advice to say we have a huge set of your data and we have a huge set of everyone's data, and so we can pick out from the global data the patterns that specifically apply to you. So that's where the future is interesting.

Speaker 1: 28:19

I agree.

Speaker 1: 28:20

The story that I've told a few times, which I think that this is very similar to, is that when Tesla introduced their autopilot, one of the early adopters of that was trying to drive home every day using autopilot and for the first few times it couldn't make this quite tricky corner.

Speaker 1: 28:37

And eventually, after a month of trying, tesla's autopilot learned to take this corner. But it wasn't that his Tesla learned to take that corner. Every Tesla on the planet now knew how to take that corner. And that's the incredible thing about that data, isn't it? You could have a coach that's a very experienced coach and he's got the data of 1,000 athletes he's coached over his time. But with ar, you can draw in that data from literally hundreds of thousands of people that have trained in vastly different situations across vastly different age categories. Draw that into your specific situation. I think, from a data point of view, incredible, when you look at things like chat, gpt and claudeai and all of these other AIs that can write content, how do you see that impacting your day job in terms of being an author and a journalist?

Speaker 3: 29:25

I think there's two sides to that question too. One is how does it affect what I do Like, how will I use AI, and the other is how will it affect my industry? Will there be any industry for me to use my skills in? I think. To take the second question first, ai is going to decimate some aspects of the journalism industry and that's going to have effects on everyone, regardless of what kind of work they do. And the analogy I would make is to like classified ads.

Speaker 3: 29:49

20, 30 years ago, it used to be that newspapers and even magazines made a huge portion of their revenue from classified ads, and then things like Craigslist and Google came along and basically made classified ads obsolete. Now, very few journalists, actually people weren't growing up and saying when I grow up, I want to be a classified ad person. That wasn't a profession. But the demise of classified ads decimated newspapers and magazines, and so the ability to write thoughtful, long form, investigative journalism was severely hurt by the fact that Craigslist eliminated classified ads. And so, similarly, ai is going to write a bunch of crap content. Some of it may be good, it'll get better, but whatever it doesn't even need to have a value judgment attached.

Speaker 3: 30:32

Ai is going to write a bunch of fairly easy content that ultimately is rehashing stuff that's already out there in a digestible form. You want to know how do I repair drywall or something, and you go to Google or whatever, and instead of going to Holman Gardens explanation, you're going to go to some AI site that is just regurgitating the established knowledge on how to repair drywall. That's going to take a revenue source from magazines and newspapers and websites and things like that, and so that's going to leave less money for people who want to write new stuff that AI is not yet capable of doing. So I'm worried about what AI will do to the industry's financial viability.

Speaker 3: 31:13

It's a new technology, but it's not super different from the worries that have beset journalism for the last 30 years. Ever since I you know I, since before I even became a journalist journalism has been losing sources of revenue as technology has advanced, and AI is going to be the next step on that for sure. The other side of the equation is what will a good journalist do with it? But there's also just the fact is there used to be a lot of non-spectacular journalism jobs that provided jobs for people but also made journalistic enterprises viable. The good journalists were also partly funded by the people putting together the classified ads or trained in that environment to become the good journalist putting together the classified ads, or trained in that environment to become the good journalist.

Speaker 3: 31:52

Yeah, so the whole ecosystem is affected when another source of revenue is cannibalized. That's the set of gloomy view. But look what amazing stuff I'm going to be doing. I have a friend, a good friend of mine, who's been trying to convince me to leverage AI more in my writing and research process. I respect him a lot so I've been trying to say, okay, I'll give it a try, because I'm generally much like with sports technology, like GPS, watches, whatever. I'm an interested observer but a bit of a skeptic in terms of using it. When ChatGPT first came out, I played around with it, but I haven't been using it in my own work. And my friend was like you you're shooting yourself in the foot because there's all these things.

Speaker 3: 32:27

You come across a question. Maybe it's not the central element of your story, but it's a background element. You need to know exactly what is the history of this particular development or exactly how does this molecule work in this particular context. You try Googling it and it's a bit of a long process. You come up with a lot of crap. It's hard to isolate what you need. You ask chat, gpt or the equivalent of, and you get a really detailed, nuanced answer that you're going to double check. You're not just going to cut and paste it into your article, but it's going to help clarify things and you can just, instead of wasting two hours trying to figure out some nuance, in five minutes you can get the answer.

Speaker 3: 33:02

I've done sort of head-to-head comparisons where I'm like, okay, I'm Googling something that's not working, okay, let's see what chat GPT has to say, and sometimes its answers are like oh, wow, that really helps clarify things for me and now I know where to go to get the original source.

Speaker 3: 33:14

It enhances productivity. Let me just continue in the mode of yelling at the clouds or whatever that. The question I sometimes ask myself and this isn't just with respect to AI, but with respect to a lot of things is is my goal to maximize my productivity or is my goal to find ways of doing things that I find fun and enjoyable? And there's an extent to which one of the great joys of like long form journalism or writing a book or a magazine piece is I love following some of those rabbit holes. So, in the name of greater efficiency, not getting lost in those rabbit holes is a good thing I'm not sure I want to give up the pleasure of. There's a cost to efficiency sometimes. I have no doubt that I'll be using AI more and more to help patch holes or find things or even generate ideas maybe. But I'm a slow adopter because my goal isn't always just to maximize productivity.

Speaker 1: 34:17

So Alex and I have just been chatting about ai, and ai is the greatest threat to our business and the greatest opportunity.

Speaker 1: 34:20

We talk a lot about ai and the impact of it in our business and how we can turn that into an amazing opportunity within the trusted team. So if you want to know more about how ai is going to affect your business and how you can seize that opportunity, why don't you book a one hour free coaching call with me at the trusted team and we'll understand how it can impact you. I think you make a lot of very good points there and the most interesting one for me, which I completely buy into I'm just writing my next book and it's based on the content of over 100 episodes of the podcast, and I could use ChatGPT and a few other technologies to do that over the course of the next week if I wanted to. I could churn 100 episodes into 15 chapters and I would have the Business of Endurance book, but I don't want to do it that way because I know that I get a lot of pleasure from that writing process. I think that's really interesting.

Speaker 1: 35:10

Now, claire always has to ask something to do with nutrition in this podcast because that's her bag but sticking with kind of the technologies and the developments and the advancements. What do you think is most exciting in the world of nutrition and the science around nutrition in New Jersey sports at the moment? Where do you think the new developments and the exciting stuff is happening there?

Speaker 3: 35:31

Yeah, an interesting question. A lot of the buzz right now is on and it's funny how things go in cycles. It's on carbohydrates how do you get more carbohydrates down your gullet and to stay there without causing various forms of digestive distress? Of course, not everyone agrees that this is a good avenue to go down. But if you look at what's happening in professional cycling Tour de France teams they're pushing in some cases very high, like 120 grams an hour of carbohydrate. Does the research suggest that 120 grams of carbohydrate makes you faster? That depends how you read it. There's plenty of debates to be had.

Speaker 3: 36:07

But in terms of, if I were asked, what's the most interesting technological development in nutrition recently, that's like Morton sports drink or sports gels with their hydro gel that supposedly encapsulates the carbohydrates in your stomach, so it you don't get digestive distress, and then releases it once it's into your gut. That's been very like in running, particularly where the jostling causes a lot of digestive distress. Not many technologies get so widely adopted so quickly and that doesn't prove that it works because there's a lot of herd mentality. But that is in keeping with this idea of how do we get more carbohydrates in without feeling sick. 10 years ago the trend was the opposite. It was like how do we survive on fewer carbohydrates? How do we train ourselves to deal with no carbohydrates so that we can go ketogenic diet and lots of people still advocate that, or at least modified versions of that. Like you live on a ketogenic diet but then you give yourself 20 or 30 grams of carbohydrate an hour during an exercise to avoid low blood sugar.

Speaker 3: 37:04

I don't think we have final answers for what the best way of handling that. But this is where I think in the next few years there's going to be a lot of debate, a lot of research trying to figure out how many carbohydrates can we really take. Can we find ways of getting them in that are less uncomfortable? Is it necessary? Are there alternatives that are better? What are the effects on health? Is it like a sort of Faustian bargain where you can mainline carbohydrates but it's going to mess up your metabolism long-term?

Speaker 1: 37:32

And, yeah, these debates are going to keep rolling, I think we've covered a number of topics that were in your book, which I'm going to hold up here. Most of this is most of listeners get this audio only, but it is such a brilliant book and I found myself giving it to other people too, as I mentioned earlier, because it's got so much great thought-provoking content in there, as well as inspiring stories. I know you've got Malcolm Gladwell writing the foreword For me. Your writing style is very similar, but obviously in a different genre, so I absolutely loved it. And what books do you find yourself recommending to other people?

Speaker 3: 38:09

either because they've had a huge impact on you or you think they provide a huge amount of value to others the one that had the strongest influence on me and I continue to think is one of the greatest books on sports science ever, was david epstein's the sports gene. That came out, I think, in 2013. So just as I was getting rolling on endear and I remember I actually read a review copy when it came out and I thought, oh, this is a really interesting book. Too bad, it's going to be a complete dud because it's so full of, like, really nuanced discussions of science. It wasn't just here's how you can get 10% better. It was like here's the evidence it suggests maybe this is why Kenyans are so fast. But there's other theories, like.

Speaker 3: 38:46

It was a very sophisticated and nuanced discussion and then it became a massive bestseller. I think Barack Obama recommended it on Twitter or something like that. It was a very successful book and I thought, wow, I've been misjudging the population of the world. After all, there's a huge population of people who are really hungry for good, nuanced, not super easy discussions of how the body and how the brain works, and so I really I consciously wrote Endure, trying to emulate that level of trying not to dumb it down, trying to really reflect the complexity that is real world science. So David Epstein's the Sports Gene huge. He wrote another book called Range a few years later, which I also found really influential. That's broader, not just about sports science, but basically making the case against the idea that you need to just specialize early and put in your 10,000 hours and do one thing that you should explore broadly, and so I've found that super influential.

Speaker 1: 39:36

I've read Range, but it just occurred to me that I haven't read the sports gene. I love Range, I think Range is fantastic and I particularly love his reference in there where you know the world has got too niched down when you have to check, when you're seeing an ear specialist, that they're not just a left ear specialist, but yeah, really good. But I haven't read the sports gene, so I will definitely be adding that to my reading list I was trying to think what I would choose as the next one.

Speaker 3: 39:58

there's a book by christy ashwandan called good to go. I can't remember the subtitle. It's on my shelf here. That's like the strange science of recovery which is this huge, multi-billion dollar industry now, and I don't want to give away the ending, who did it or whatever. But the general theme of the book nonetheless is that a lot of the things we athletes in particular do for recovery don't actually do very much and that getting in the right frame of mind is probably more important than the temperature of your ice bath or whatever.

Speaker 3: 40:25

And what I like about Christie's book, the book Good to Go, like David, it's really refusing to tell people what they want to hear.

Speaker 3: 40:33

It's telling people as honestly as possible what the science says, and that's an occupational hazard or just a temptation or a dilemma. That in the field of sports science and as human performance more generally, it's a constant temptation. You know what people want to hear, what would be an uplifting message, and so it's always tempting to just write that instead of when a study comes out that seems to give some really handy, good tips that people will want to do. You just want to ride that, instead of questioning it, you can think of all the controversy over things like power poses and stuff. It's nice to think that if you stand up and spread your legs that you're going to perform 10% better, but if you pause and really look into the evidence, sometimes it's not as good as you think. So I think Christie's book is a good example of writing that's fun and interesting to read, but also does its best to be honest rather than just telling us what we want to hear. Brilliant.

Speaker 1: 41:20

And that's not a book I've heard of before, so that's definitely also going on the reading list. Now we have a tradition on the podcast that we get the last guest to ask the next guest a question without knowing who that is going to be. Our last guest was two guests. Unusually, we had a father and daughter as guests for the last one. So jeff and chloe smith actually gave us two questions, so I'm gonna ask both and we'll see how we go. Jeff specifically said could you describe your creative process, how do you come up with your new ideas and what helps you overcome creative block? And given that he didn't know that was being sent to an author, I think that's quite appropriate. So how do you get over your creative blocks and what's your creative process?

Speaker 3: 42:00

Yeah, it's a tricky one. I guess the easiest thing to answer is how I don't come up with my ideas is to sit down and try and come up with ideas. So I write. For example, I write four columns a month for Outside Magazine. So that's a lot of ideas to generate, and if I have no ideas for next month's column I need to come up with ideas.

Speaker 3: 42:17

If I sit down and contemplate the world and try and think of ideas, that doesn't help me. So for me the creative process is an active process of going out and reading things. My Outside column it usually focuses on a scientific study or some scientific topic. I don't just think of what questions would I like to answer, and then I'll try and find it. I go out and I scan through the table of contents of half a dozen or a dozen journals and check out every paper that's been written in those journals in the last couple of months. Usually I'll then find something that clicks. So I go look for ideas as opposed to hoping that they'll come to me, and I'm going down rabbit holes, as we already mentioned With great pleasure.

Speaker 1: 42:52

Yeah, Chloe's question was if money wasn't a factor, how would you spend your time differently?

Speaker 3: 42:57

Yeah, that's it. That's a form of that question. I try to ask myself that on a regular basis. My goal is to, even though money is a factor, to try and live as much as possible as though it weren't the overriding factor. I started out, I studied physics initially and I did a PhD in physics and a lot of people, when they finish a PhD in physics, there's a very well-trodden path to go work for an investment bank or a consultancy and make big piles of cash, and so, as a journalist, I'm often facing dilemmas or having discussions with people about Alex. You could monetize your position more effectively by hiring an assistant. You could produce twice as much content, and if you could did some marketing, you could do this and you could do that. There's lots of ways that I could conceivably make more money from the things I'm currently doing, and one of the things that gives me pause is that I stop and ask myself what was the question?

Speaker 3: 43:47

And am I just doing this to get money or am I doing this because I want to? I often go back, so I used to then tell myself, if the goal was to make money, I should have just gone and been an investment banker or a consultant. So I'm clearly not trying to optimize for money. So therefore, I have to stop and think what is it that I want to do? And what I want to do is go down those rabbit holes. So four articles a month for outside means four different sets of rabbit holes, learning about new topics. Now they overlap with each other, but I enjoy learning about things and I'm learning about them well enough to try and explain them to other people. Finding out things that I didn't know, that I didn't know, the unknown unknowns, not just the known unknowns. I'm not saying that my life is a perfect encapsulation of what I would do if money didn't matter, but that's the sort of learning new things and trying new things and getting to go deep on them is, I think, what gives me satisfaction.

Speaker 1: 44:33

Amazing and what you almost always find in businesses. You make your money because you're so passionate about doing the thing. If you're doing it because of the money, then you end up delivering far less value in whatever it is that you do than if you're doing it because it's your passion, because you love it, because you want to end up going down those rabbit holes. What you deliver is then, for example, an amazing book, so it feeds each other brilliantly. So one last final question, Alex When's the next book coming? Tell us what you're going to have in store for us next and what we can look forward to, because I'm itching to get on to the next one. Thank you for asking.

Speaker 3: 45:10

I am, as we speak, I am tearing out the last vestiges of my hair, trying to close out a book. I think it's going to go out under the title of the Explorer's Gene, basically, and it should be out early 2020. It's a book about exploring the science of exploring. What drives us to seek out the unknown? What do we get out of it? When do we decide to keep exploring? When do we decide to stop and enjoy what we've got? What do we do right? What do we do wrong? What can we do better? So this is a broader question than just endurance sports. It's broader than just exploring Christopher Columbus. It's so broad that I've had a real struggle trying to get my arms around the topic and figure out what I want to say about it. It's been not to speak in cliches, but it's been fun to explore the topic of exploring and I'm pretty excited to get the book in its final form shipped off.

Speaker 1: 45:52

I'm sold immediately. That sounds fantastic. I will be looking forward to seeing that released, because that's the sort of topic that's just as applicable to business as it is to sport, as it is to life. So, yeah, I think that sounds awesome. Alex, it's been an absolute pleasure. I've loved chatting to you, I've wanted to get on the podcast for a while, and so this has been an absolute pleasure and lived up to the expectation and surpassed it. Thank you so much, and good luck finishing off that book.

Speaker 3: 46:19

Thanks so much, Charlie. It's been a lot of fun to chat.

Speaker 1: 46:27

So, claire, you weren't able to join us live for the interview, so now that you've had a chance to listen to it, what did you make of it?

Speaker 2: 46:33

I'm sorry I missed it. I think that's the biggest thing. It was an excellent episode. Having read a lot of Alex's journalism, it was brilliant to have him on. You talked a lot about his book in job, which is excellent, and you were asking him specific questions around. If a lion, for example, were behind you, would you be able to run faster? And I thought the way that he explained actually there are so many parts to that answer around, the psychology being potentially the strength rather than physically the endurance. I thought that was fantastic and, of course, I loved his answers around nutrition. We had a nice question seeded by myself in there. I really like the way that he is so data focused. He doesn't follow the trends in terms of just getting on the bandwagon of what everybody else is saying, and I thought that came across really well in the interview that actually looking a little bit deeper at what is the evidence saying, what should we be doing? What did you think about his answer, by the way, to ai and data?

Speaker 1: 47:34

I love the conversation about ai, like I love using ai to make me more productive, but equally I don't want it to take away parts of the process, like the book writing process that I enjoy. So I completely bought into that and I loved what he said about going down rabbit holes and finding different things. And the same happens when you're writing. When you're writing, you know your brain fires and you go oh, actually that's a different tangent. I could go down and I hadn't thought about that. That's really cool. I'll do that.

Speaker 1: 48:01

And if you only use ai, then it will become a very formulaic, boring read, I believe yeah whereas if you use AI to enhance that process and enhance that learning and help you make new connections, then I actually think it can send you far deeper down the rabbit hole and, yeah, so I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Were there any other takeaways that you had from the Alex episode?

Speaker 2: 48:24

he definitely talks in the way that I think, in the way that I work with clients, certainly in in terms of you very nicely asked the question around AI and data collection. I really enjoyed his answer in terms of actually sometimes asking yourself the question how do I feel and what should I be doing at this point in time, rather than using so many wearables and having that wearable tell you what you should be feeling. So I thought the way that he described that was really good, that actually we should be using that data but doing something with the data, which is what I always talk to my clients about. There's no point in collecting 12 years worth of MyFitnessPal data if you don't know what to do with it and what it means.

Speaker 2: 49:04

I thought the episode was fantastic and just to hear about his journey through kind of his journalism and all the stories particularly, actually, you talked right at the very beginning about the endure book and about the sub two hours and I thought that was really fascinating, where he kind of left it in terms of you know what now, in terms of who is going to be the athlete that breaks that, and is it actually the advances in technology, and shoe technology in particular, or is it that we just have a number of athletes at the moment that are exceptional, that are going to break that two hour? So I thought that was a really interesting take on it.

Speaker 1: 49:42

I think it's brilliant. I've been wanting to get Alex on for a long time. I just think if anyone hasn't read Endure, you just got to read it. It's just a brilliant book and I love his writing style. He's very much like Malcolm Gladwell in that he tells wonderful stories and then you make very strong connections as a result of those wonderful stories. Well, another awesome episode of the business of endurance for all of us out there. Keep on training.

Speaker 2: 50:11

So I promised right at the beginning of this episode that I would help you to be able to write down and record your data in a way that you can understand it. So in the show notes below you can click on the link and you can download the data decoder.

Speaker 1: 50:21

If you want us to keep getting amazing guests onto the Business of Endurance podcast. We don't ask for you to pay for us. We don't ask for patronage. All we ask for is that you subscribe to the podcast, ideally on Apple. Give us a five-star rating because it shows us you care and, if you've got time, leave us a comment. One word is fine, something like inspiring or amazing or something like that, but we really do appreciate it and it will help us to continue to deliver amazing guests on what we hope you find to be an amazing podcast. Thanks very much. Jeff and Chloe from Big Moose Charity, we featured in episode one of season seven, made such a great impact on the both of us, we decided to make them our charity sponsor for season seven. You know, they really touched me in the sense that I lost my brother-in-law to suicide in Wales and these guys are working their socks off to help prevent situations like that. So, claire, why did Jeff and Chloe really make an impact on you?

Speaker 2: 51:28

Coming from a background in clinical nutrition and working in mental health, to me also it hit a spot in terms of the charity and how they are building therapy to help support people with mental health difficulties, and they've saved over 50 lives now and already met their first target of a million and their new target, 15 million, that they're trying to get to.

Speaker 1: 51:49

It's absolutely incredible and 15 million is a huge target they've set themselves, but they're speeding up help that people in desperately in need get, and this help is needed more than ever. I know how problematic mental health issues are in today's world. So if you think you can help Big Moose Charity and they're particularly looking for corporate partners to help them raise that 15 million, if you think you can help Big Moose Charity and they're particularly looking for corporate partners to help them raise that 15 million, if you think you can help them or link them into a company that can help them, the best place to go to is bigmoosecharityco, or you can find them on Instagram as bigmoosecharity, or you can even email Jeff at jeffatbigmooseco.